A Novel Quantitative Approach to Staging and Assessing Recovery from Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus: The Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus Metabolic Recovery Index

Abstract

Discovery of insulin in 1921 changed the lives of patients with type 1 diabetes (T1DM) forever. What had been a death sentence became a manageable, albeit chronic, disease. Insulin did not cure the disease, as it did not address the actual disease process, but instead treated its sequelae, namely elevated blood sugars. Importantly, insulin administration fails to ensure normoglycaemia. Even with the most sophisticated 'near closed-loop' methods, glucose homeostasis is not restored to normal. T1DM patients face complications, both short-term, such as hypo- and hyperglycaemia, and long-term, with increased glycosylation of proteins leading to eye, kidney, nervous system and other sequelae. These complications are associated with significant morbidity and mortality even after intensive insulin treatment. Nearly 100 years after the discovery of insulin, we continue to face the challenge of addressing the disease process itself, in order to fundamentally improve the life of these patients. There are major efforts to achieve just that: to completely arrest the autoimmune process destroying the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas, or at least significantly slow the process to blunt and delay short- and long-term complications. The aim of this Communication is to propose a novel assessment tool that would serve as a quantitative outcome measure by which therapies, short of clinical cure, may be compared and their true benefit to the treatment of diabetes assessed.

Keywords: autoimmunity; metabolic assessment; recovery; type 1 diabetes mellitus.

Figure 1

The road to clinical type 1 diabetes (T1DM) [7] and stages of recovery from the disease.